Human Sacrifice - Peter Leeson

used an additional mechanism to ensure the sacri…ce’s publicity. As Campbell described it,
after the meriah was slaughtered (Risley 1892: 406),
The ‡esh cut from the victim was instantly taken home by the persons who
had been deputed by each village to bring it . . . . In each village all who
stayed at home fasted rigidly until the ‡esh arrived. The bearer deposited it in
the place of public assembly, where it was received by the priest and the heads of
families. The priest divided it into two portions, one of which he o¤ered to the
earth goddess by burying it in a whole in the ground with his back turned, and
without looking. Then each man added a little earth to bury it, and the priest
poured water on the spot from a hill gourd. The other portion of ‡esh he divided
into as many shares as there were heads of houses present. Each head of a house
rolled his shred of ‡esh in leaves, and buried it in his favourite …eld.
In this way a sacri…cing community’s public ritual was extended via a “piggy-backed”
ritual performed by an immolation festival’s external attendees— itself public in each of their
villages and carried out “with great pomp”— extending knowledge of the sacri…cing community’s
immolation to the inhabitants of villages who weren’t themselves able to participate
(Eliade 1958: 345).
Kond communities’ wealth destruction via human sacri…ce also overcame the problem
posed by the possibility of faking wealth destruction. The reason for this is simple: it’s
nearly impossible to fake the immolation of a live human— particularly through forms of
immolation as brutal as those the Konds used.
Nevertheless, a di¢ culty remained. How could immolation-festival attendees, and thus
those who heard about such festivals second-hand, be sure that the victim a community
immolated was a purchased victim? Further, how could other communities have an idea of
how much wealth an immolating community destroyed when it sacri…ced such a victim?
Kond communities ensured others that the meriahs they sacri…ced were purchased by
leveraging the persons who sold them meriahs. Recall that a meriah’s seller attended the
immolation festival of the community he sold to. His presence acted as a kind of sales receipt,
verifying the fact that the meriah about to be sacri…ced had indeed been bought. Of course,
it was possible for a Kond community to attempt to bribe such an individual to verify a sale
that never happened. But the bribe a seller would have required to do this exceeded the
wealth a community needed to destroy to protect its property. Because of this, communities
preferred to buy their meriahs instead.
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